Knife Guy

Baggage

Here’s a travel story that will send you back: Some years ago, Eric Ripert, the executive chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, was returning to New York from Washington, D.C., where he’d cooked for a charity event. He put his carry-on bag through the airport security scanner, and an alarm started beeping. “Oh,” Ripert recalled thinking. “My knives.” In his bag was a collection of knives that he’d used at the benefit—paring knives, and long fish knives that resemble machetes. Ripert tried to explain; the guards looked at him suspiciously. Fortunately, he was travelling with another chef, Jean-Louis Palladin, who produced a copy of the Washington Post with a photograph of the chefs at the benefit. “We all laughed, and that was it,” he said.

This was, obviously, before September 11, 2001. Now, Ripert said, he wouldn’t dare bring his knives in his carry-on. But he still has to travel. “Chefs don’t share their knives,” he said. “It’s part of the ABC of being a chef.” He usually folds them between layers of clothes and packs them in his suitcase. Ripert explained all this one day last fall in the Louis Vuitton store on East Fifty-seventh Street, where he’d come to work out the details for a custom-made knife suitcase. Louis Vuitton has a history of making special-order trunks: there was a trunk that transforms into a shower, and an iPod trunk commissioned by Karl Lagerfeld; a British lord had a trunk made for his special rubber ducky. Not long ago, Ripert said, he’d been summoned to the Vuitton store for a birthday party that Alicia Keys was throwing for her future husband, the hip-hop producer Swizz Beatz. She’d bought him a “fantastically magical” trunk that unfolds into a bed. Ripert cooked dinner for the guests in the store, on a rented stove, and then Ferraris ferried everyone to an after-party at the Guggenheim.

Ripert, who has silver hair and a bubbly disposition, was wearing jeans, a blue shirt, and Tibetan prayer-bead bracelets. He’d brought twenty or so knives in two briefcases, and a few more wrapped in a leather roll. “Sometimes beginners transport them in a towel,” he said. “If you’re a real chef, you don’t do that.” A few Vuitton representatives stood by as Ripert took out the knives he uses the most. They were mainly for cutting fish, Le Bernardin’s specialty: a big Japanese knife, by a company called MAC (“This is a mean object,” he said, shaving a hair from his thumb. “See?”); and some thin German knives by Wüsthof.

When he was asked to describe his dream knife trunk, he gestured to the hard briefcases and to the leather roll and said, “I would like a combination of both.” The leather was good for cushioning odd-shaped tools. “For instance, here I have a whisk.” He picked up an object that looked like a Ping-Pong paddle. “And here I have a mandoline, which I use to cut truffles.” He went on, “I want it to be stable at all times.” He thought for a second and asked, “I don’t know if this makes sense, but you know those mattresses that are advertised on TV, which take the shape of the body? Could it be something like that? Pediatric?” An aide said he’d look into it.

Ripert flipped through a book of leather designs and nixed the Louis Vuitton logo. “It’s a little over the top,” he said. “Like, ‘This guy’s coming to cut fish!’ “ He selected a plain grainy black leather.

Months passed. The knives went to Asnières, outside Paris, where they were given to a trunkmaker named Eric Leroux, who oversees a framemaker, a lozineur (someone who edges hard-sided luggage), a ferreur (an expert in brass corners), and a locksmith. In January, Ripert returned to the New York store. On a coffee table sat a black suitcase-shaped trunk. He opened it and said, “My knives!” There were six knives in a row, in specially shaped slots. “They understand the importance of guarding the knives,” Ripert said. “The mentality is very different, very . . .”

“French,” a Vuitton employee said.

Ripert nodded. “You don’t want to have to say it.”

On a shelf underneath were the tools—whisk, mandoline, oyster-shucking knife, shears, and an apple corer. “I like to use apples with fish, because it’s very acidic,” Ripert said. He showed how to use one of the knives to cut meat off a bone, at an angle. “Like a slalom. It is perfect for boning!”

A female employee from Le Bernardin started giggling.

“Did I say a bad word?” Ripert asked.

“Deboning,” the Vuitton man said.

Champagne was poured, and Ripert made a toast. “In life, you appreciate things,” he said. “But it’s important not to get obsessed.” ♦